Читать книгу Under Two Skies - E. W. Hornung - Страница 6

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About this time a change came over the whim-driver at the Seven-mile. It was noticed by young Parker, who saw him frequently, and lamented by the landlord of the Governor Loftus Hotel, the nearest grog-shanty, where Jim and his cheque were now several weeks overdue. The fact was, Jim had renounced the luxury of the periodical "drunk," and was coming out as a bush dandy. He shaved himself every morning of his life; he appeared in none but the snowiest moleskins and the pinkest and most becoming of striped cotton shirts; he even went to the extreme lunacy of shining his boots every evening before retiring to his bunk. But, what was far more remarkable, his speech was the speech of Jim-of-the-Whim no more. He dropped no aspirates, his sentences were grammatical; and without any specific deduction from his case, it may be noted as a curious fact that errors of speech may be easily acquired by any educated man who chooses to live long enough in a low grade, and takes pains to forget what culture he once possessed. He seldom swore, and when he did the short sharp pistol-crack was a mere mockery of his former bullock-driving broadside. Stumpy, could he but have spoken, would have borne valuable testimony on the latter point, since he was the party most affected (not forgetting the whim-horse, a hardened drudge) by his master's change in this respect; and the sagacious little animal would have assured you that the endearing epithets now showered upon him were entirely inoffensive in their nature.

It would have been taxing feline intelligence unfairly, however, to have expected the little cat to note the subtler indications of the change in Jim: the look of expectancy and hope with which he rose of mornings, the disappointment in his face at evening, the glances he would cast all day along the track towards the homestead, the frequency with which he sang, whistled, and hummed one tune. These points were too fine for the cleverest cat in the world—even Dick Whittington's might have missed them.

But events long looked for come in the end when least expected; and the coming of Jim's goddess was a case in point.

The whim was out of order, and Jim for once idle, waiting for the blacksmith, who had been sent out from the homestead, and gone back to his forge there with a bit of greasy paper covered with diagrams. Jim sat outside on the ground in the shade of the hut, toes up, arms folded, eyes closed. A clay pipe was between his teeth, but the ashes in the bowl were cold. Jim was asleep, and dreaming of her who was alternately minx and angel in his waking mind, but always angel in his dreams. Suddenly he awoke: and the angel sat not far from him in her saddle.

The pipe fell from Jim's lips as his jaw dropped. Next moment he had sprung to his feet, and a dusky colour flooded his face with one swift wave.

"Good afternoon," he said, snatching off his wideawake. "I—I beg your pardon, miss."

Miss Jenny begged his. "I have come to be shown how a whim works," said she.

"Ah, I feared you had forgotten all about that!"

"So I had," declared Miss Jenny with unblushing readiness. "I never thought of it until, riding this way again, the whim reminded me. I am ready to be shown at once, if"—severely—"you are not too busy!"

Jim stepped diffidently forward, gnawing at his moustache, and proffered his aid as formerly. But she cut him short.

"No, thank you; I'm not going to get off; I can't stay a moment longer than just to see this wonderful whim—then I'm off."

This was delicious. If the whim were admitted to be out of gear she would simply canter away without a thank-you; therefore Jim would admit nothing. In silence he led the way to the whim, Miss Jenny riding after him at a walk. Under the black ugly wooden framework, which was high enough for Miss Jenny to continue sitting upright in her saddle, they both stopped; and Jim began to explain.

He began with the great wooden drum above their heads, and step by step expounded the working of the whim; but when he led the lady's hack into such a position that Miss Jenny could see down into the shaft, he had not yet mentioned that an accident had suspended the working.

The sides of the shafts were lined with horizontal slabs of wood; and the mischief was that one of the slabs near the top had become loose, and had at last fallen the full depth of a hundred feet, and so smashed and jammed the bucket, which was just clear of the water at the bottom, as to make it immovable. One slab having loosened itself, others were likely to do the same; the shafts were no longer secure, and the danger of descending to the injured bucket (without testing every slab on the way, as the blacksmith proposed) was great.

There was only one shaft for Miss Jenny to look down, for the uninjured bucket hung at the mouth of the other. She did not much like looking down the smooth-sided, damp, narrow shaft; it put her in mind of the bottomless pit; yet to gaze down, down, down, rather fascinated her.

"You have not yet shown me how it works," she said presently, glancing across the raised lips of the shaft at the whim-driver, who was leaning over them and grasping the perpendicular rope a little higher than his head.

"The whim's not in working order." As he spoke Jim watched her face, with a rather reckless light in his blue eyes, for the effect of his little sell. He expected her to ride off at once; but she did nothing of the kind. She exhibited no annoyance at all, but would know all about the jamming of the bucket at the bottom.

"Then will some one have to go to the bottom?" she asked, shuddering—"down this endless awful rope?"

"Some one will. There's nothing else for it." Miss Jenny's eyes had been downcast; now she raised them swiftly. Her eyes often were downcast, and she as often raised them thus.

"Dare you?"

"I shouldn't wonder."

The next sound was a sharp shrill cry from Miss Jenny. The little dainty riding-whip—which she had never once dropped on all her long and lonely rides—had somehow slipped from her fingers and fallen fairly into the mouth of the shaft, and so out of sight.

Then came a shriller, sharper cry from Miss Jenny, followed by the exclamation, "Don't!" reiterated in great alarm.

But it was too late: Jim was descending the single rope into the horrible pit, hand under hand. Jenny's vision grew dim; she lost sight of him in the deeper gloom of the shaft; and as she saw him last his upturned eyes were fixed upon her with a strange, smiling, singular expression.

Suddenly the rope, on which the girl now concentrated her trembling, anxious gaze, ceased to vibrate. He had reached the bottom, then. But why did he not shout up to her his safety? She swayed in her saddle with the suspense.

Watching the rope with an agonised face, she hardly breathed until it began once more to vibrate; then she lowered her eyes into the impenetrable gloom; and at length a figure, spattered and stained with dirt, sweat streaming from the white forehead, and blots of blood upon the hands, with the little riding-whip between his teeth—a figure that ten minutes of strenuous effort had turned into an apparition—climbed slowly into sight, and so, hand over hand, into the open air.

A Count de Lorge would have struck the lady with the whip; but Jim just handed it over without a word, and flung himself upon the ground. Without a word Miss Jenny received her whip; she could not speak; but she could see four deep dents in the whalebone, where Jim's teeth had done their best to meet, in the struggle of the stifling upward climb.

All at once a noise came from the shaft—a thumping and a bumping against its sides—growing more distant, but ending in a loud metallic crash. Jim had leapt to his feet, and was gazing down the shaft.

"What is it?" asked Miss Jenny tremulously; her nerves were shaken.

"Only another slab, miss. It'll about do for the old bucket."

"Are the slabs so heavy?"

"Damp, and heavy as lead."

"Suppose—oh, suppose you had been down below a minute longer!"

"Why, miss, I should have been a stiff 'un!"

There was a long pause between them. Miss Jenny broke it at last in a whisper—

"Did you know the—the danger—before you went down?"

The whim-driver laughed without answering; and a minute later a cloud of orange-coloured sand, far over the plain, was all that could be seen of Miss Jenny from the whim, even from the top of the framework, on which Jim had mounted.